This past class period the group of James, Maia, and myself conducted the milk lab previously seen in the YouTube video, to test it out. The lab consisted of milk, food coloring, and dish soap.
Procedure
1. We each filled our pans with a different substance: Maia filled hers with skim milk, James filled his with 2% milk, and I filled mine with whole milk.
2. We then poured a drop of food coloring in each pan, and lightly touched the substance with a toothpick doused with dish soap.
This is what we saw:
The whole milk reacting in action.
The skim milk hardly reacts.
The 2% milk gives us a decent reaction.
The orange juice reacts much like the skim did.
3. We then repeated the previous experiment to ensure the accuracy of the results, then picked new substances to even further confirm our results.
Conclusion
Fat is susceptible to being broken up, so when the dish soap touches the substance, it weakens the surface tension and breaks the dipole bonds of the milk fats. It does this by breaking up the fat and surrounding it, splitting it apart and causing the dispersion/reaction. The liquids with fat used in the lab reacted to the dish soap, while the liquids without fat failed to react, which is why in the pictures above the whole milk responds much greater to the dish soap than the 2% and the orange juice do.
